1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed generally to performance monitor units. More specifically, the present invention is directed to an apparatus, system, computer program product and method of seamlessly integrating performance monitor data with thermal event information.
2. Description of Related Art
A performance monitor is a program (software or firmware) that enables a processor to monitor selected system characteristics for performance enhancement and/or diagnostic purposes. Some of the characteristics that may be monitored include the utilization of a processor's instruction execution and storage control. Information relating to a processor's instruction execution may reveal elapsed time between events in a processing system while information relating to storage control may provide access times to a processing system's L1 cache, L2 cache and/or main memory.
Software engineers ordinarily use the information relating to a processor's instruction execution to optimize programs by relocating branch instructions and memory accesses. Information relating to storage control, on the other hand, may be used to identify performance bottlenecks specific to particular software or hardware environments.
Another characteristic that is sometimes monitored is power consumption or heat dissipation. Power consumption is particularly important because circuit density of integrated chips continues to increase. As circuit density increases so does power consumption. To avoid damage to a chip in general, and to a processor in particular, conditions that lead to the processor, or part of the processor, to be hotter than desired need to be detected. Once detected, the processor may take corrective actions to reduce power consumption. These corrective actions usually lead to a reduction in performance.
It is well known that proper system performance analyses include taking into consideration all conditions that impact performance. Thus, thermal events that lead to a system performance reduction have to be taken into consideration during a system performance analysis.
Generally, thermal events (that lead to a system performance reduction) may be obtained provided that power consumption is being monitored. Likewise, utilization of processor's instruction execution and storage control in general may be obtained if monitored. However, the information related to thermal events is not correlated to information related to a processor's instruction execution and storage control. Thus, a user has to manually and painstakingly do so.
Thus, what is needed is an apparatus, system, computer program product and method of seamlessly integrating thermal event information with hardware performance monitor data.